Hillsong for the unbelievers

It's been three weeks now since the Global Atheist Convention (GAC) was held in Melbourne (12-14 March). Apart from the frequently mediocre coverage on the ABC's Questions of Faith blog, and a couple pandering interviews with the most prominent speakers, I've yet to see any serious engagement with the ideas supposedly showcased - or not - at the Convention.

With Easter upon us and the residual stench from the Convention still lingering in the air, I thought I'd offer a few belated reflections.

As a theologian and someone engaged with the ethical issues raised by religion's ubiquity in Western culture, I was impressed by the emergence of the "new atheists" in the wake of the September 2001 attacks, the Iraq invasion and the various grotesqueries of the Bush presidency.

There was a kind of heedless intensity, an air of moral indignation about Dawkins and Hitchens that threw the platitudes of so much Western pluralism - with its inability, as Hirsi Ali put it, to "classify cultural phenomena as 'better' or 'worse' but only neutral or disparate" - into sharp relief.

Precisely as a Christian theologian, I couldn't help but feel a certain sympathy toward their arguments against religion. And I continue to share their contempt for the facile brand of multiculturalism that is incapable of moral judgment and stands for nothing but empty tolerance and mutually degrading respect.

But the GAC was a different matter entirely. As was observed by several of the speakers at the Convention — Phillip Adams and Tamas Pataki being the most courageous - that initial sense of moral outrage seems to have been traded for satire, and the commendable desire to argue for the superiority of atheism over every rival outlook has devolved into self-indulgent bravado.

This style of atheism lacks the appropriate seriousness, and so ends up pandering to the fashionable cynicism and ethical disengagement that dominates Western societies.

Paraphrasing Dietrich Bonhoeffer's description of German Protestantism in the 1930s, the upshot of such atheism in our time is to make people feel better, or at least more smug, about their morally bankrupt lives.

Consequently, the GAC will prove to have been little more than a Hillsong for the irreligious - which is to say, an orgy of self-congratulation presided over by egotistic pseudo-celebrities.

To put it in a nutshell: the fundamental problem with the type of atheism on display at the Convention is that it is a conceit that perfectly suits our times by providing morally indefensible lives with an alibi, a kind of rational overlay.

But in so doing, it has abandoned the historical vocation of atheism exemplified by Hume, Kierkegaard, Marx and Freud - namely, the relentless critique of every false god and cloying illusion, wherever that god may be enshrined.

In other words, the "new atheism" (a more fitting designation would be "Atheism Lite") seems unaware that it is but an oracle of the spirit of the age.

Let me explain what I mean by briefly contrasting the Atheism Lite of the GAC with what is arguably the most powerful argument ever advanced for the eradication of religion, the introduction to Karl Marx's A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Marx writes: The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.

His point, frequently overlooked, is that religion acts as a veil draped across the cold severity and injustice of life, which makes our lives tolerable by supplying them with an "illusory happiness."

For Marx, religion is a palliative; but tear away the illusion, remove those narcotic fantasies to which people cling and from which they derive a sense of contentment, and they will be forced to seek out true happiness through justice and self-determination.

The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act and fashion his own reality as a disillusioned man come to his senses; so that he may revolve around himself as his real sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

And herein lies the great paradox of Marx's critique: the only way to effect change on earth is by waging war against heaven, that is, by abolishing religion and its every arcane form. In this way, Marx says, "the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth".

But Marx's critique of religion has an unexpected twist, a barb in the tail that implicates these "new atheists" by exposing the deeper complicity concealed by their strident rhetoric. For, to be "dis-illusioned" in Marx's sense is not heroically to free oneself from the shackles and blinders of religious ideology and thus to gaze freely upon the world as it truly is.

Rather, to be "dis-illusioned" is to lay aside the Prozac and expose oneself to the anxiety of the bare, unadorned fact of one's existence, to live unaided beneath what Baudelaire called "the horrible burden of Time, which racks your shoulders and bows you downwards to the earth".

In Capital, Marx demonstrated that the advent of capitalism itself had the effect of denuding the world by ripping off the shroud of religion and dissolving the communal and familial ties that bind. But the mechanistic world laid bare by industrial capitalism induces madness in those that prospered from the wealth it generated and those that found themselves dispossessed of the fruits of their labour.

Consequently, it is as if capitalism generated its own antibodies, a form of religion inherent to its processes of production, exchange and consumption that would guarantee its survival by palliating its adherents. (So, you see, it was Marx, not Dawkins, who first suggested the workings of the meme within economic and social life: Marx insisted that, to understand capitalism, "we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.")

This religion has its own acts of penance and atonement for one's economic debauchery in the form of tokenistic charity, thrift and delayed gratification; it has its incarnation in the form of the materialisation of the commodity; it even has its own miracles in the form of compound interest and later derivatives.

The great irony of capitalism is that its progress has seen the corruption and fragmentation of morality and the decimation of institutional religion; but in their place, there persists the menagerie of pseudo-moralities and plaintive spiritualities (often in the form of so-called Western Buddhism or what Martin Amis calls "an intensified reverence for the planet") that somehow sustain, or perhaps lubricate, its global machinations.

To paraphrase Marx, the abolition of these false moralities and neo-paganisms would constitute the demand for the rediscovery of true morality and sustainable, virtuous forms of communal life. And here the "new atheists" fall tragically short of their mark.

By failing to pursue the critique of religion into the sanctuary of global capitalism itself, by reducing discussion of morality to well-being and personal security, and by neglecting to advocate some alternate form of virtuous community, they end up supplying the pathologies of capitalism with a veneer of rationality.

It is no wonder that the proper task of the critique of religion, which these "new atheists" have abandoned, is part of the Christian legacy. It was, after all, the first Christians that ripped the mouldering shroud of paganism off the cultures of late-antiquity by their unflinching declaration that God raised Jesus from death.

In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart has described the Christian revolution in terms of the stripping bare of the pagan life-world with its pantheon of gods, demigods and spirits who guaranteed the proper order of things and provided life with meaning.

"In such a world," Hart writes, "the gospel was an outrage, and it was perfectly reasonable for its cultured despisers to describe its apostles as 'atheists'. Christians were … enemies of society, impious, subversive, and irrational; and it was no more than civic prudence to detest them for refusing to honor the gods of their ancestors, for scorning the common good, and for advancing the grotesque and shameful claim that all gods and spirits had been made subject to a crucified criminal from Galilee … This was far worse than mere irreverence; it was pure and misanthropic perversity; it was anarchy."

Compared to these Christian 'atheists', the shrill denunciations and grandiose claims of the self-styled "new atheists" are just so much noise.

Scott Stephens teaches ethics at Trinity Theological College in Brisbane.